Shadow Country (2008)

by Peter Matthiessen

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: Watson Trilogy (4)

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Mentions
1,286	41	15,917	(3.96)	126
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * "Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature."--Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone--Peter Matthiessen's great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century--were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country "Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate."--Los Angeles Times "Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It's the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes."--Don DeLillo "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." --Richard Ford "Shadow Country, Matthiessen's distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy."--W. S. Merwin "[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel."--The Miami Herald… (more)

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crsyshfr21 | Nov 11, 2024 |

Extravagantly geographical, symbolic, multilayered, masterful, definitely a classic. I found it tough going, but it's possible that if I'd read it in parts instead of all at once, it would have fared better. Still, I'm not fool enough to fail to recognize how good it is, nor ignore the true love of writing and craft that went into it (read about how Matthiessen got it re-written and be impressed.) (

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amandrake | Apr 17, 2024 |

This book was originally published as a trilogy, although Mathiessen had always seen it as one novel, so he rewrote it to become this one very long book he has envisioned in the beginning.
It is a story of Ed Watson, a pioneer at the turn of the 19/20th century who tried to settle on the west coast of Florida in the heart of the Everglades. I really like local history and as I live in Florida I was eager to read this book. It does give you an insight of how remote and isolated that part of Florida was, only 100 years ago. It also portrays it as a lawless, "wild west" place with many hardships and lives were cheap, particularly people of color.
Because it was 3 books in one I found it became very repetitious, but difficult to follow. It is not a consecutive story, but tends to jump around in the story of the main character, Ed Watson. In the first hundred pages (out of 900) he is shot, so you kind know the ending and the rest of the book is fill in. There were endless characters, particularly at the beginning were not fully developed, so it was hard to relate to who they were and the relationship to the main character. Having said all that, it was beautifully written, with wonderful descriptions of the area and phrases that were poetic. (

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annebraseby | Jul 1, 2021 |

A long novel. Same story told three times from three different perspectives. Main character, E. J. Watson, is a really bad guy that you really want (almost) to like. This is a third iteration of this story. The first try was a single novel of over 1,500 pages that didn’t get published. Next try: published as three separate novels. Third try: recomposed as a single novel, whittled down to approximately 900 pages, and wins the Pulitzer Prize. I liked reading about E.J. Watson. I have always enjoyed reading about those I don’t admire and don’t feel I agree with morally almost as much as the opposite. The magic of E.J. Watson is that he is never one thing or another. After 900 pages you still don’t have a firm handle on who he is.

The three different perspectives were well done. They overlapped but there was enough different each time that you didn’t feel you were reading the same story. You learned different pieces of the story in each retelling. In fact, the biggest challenge of the novel was reconciling the three different perspectives given they were separated by so many pages. I also enjoyed reading about the Wild, Wild West era of Florida; the description of Florida reminded me of The Yearling. Ultimately, what detracted from the story was its length. It could have been and needed to be tighter and more concisely delivered. (

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afkendrick | Oct 24, 2020 |

This gripping, violent tale explores the death of E J Watson in 1910. Based on true events, the imagining of a life and the aftermath of a death is a must read for history buffs and those who enjoy a deeply felt exploration into the social issues prevalent in the South after the Civil War. (

)

Chrissylou62 | Aug 1, 2020 |

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thingScore 100

To sum it up in a few words is impossible since its interest lies in the ambition of storytelling and inevitability of story.

added by Shortride | editNational Book Foundation, Harold Augenbraum (Sep 20, 2009)

▾Other authors

» Add other authors (10 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Peter Matthiessen	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Heald, Anthony	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Series and work relationships

Belongs to Series

Watson Trilogy (4)

Is an adaptation of

Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen

Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen

Bone by Bone: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen

▾Awards and Honors

Awards

The Morning News Tournament of Books (Semi-Finalist – 2009)

National Book Award (Winner – Fiction – 2008)

William Dean Howells Medal (2010)

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▾Common Knowledge

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Canonical title

Shadow Country

Original title

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2008

People/Characters

Edgar Watson

Important places

Florida, USA

Ten Thousand Islands, Florida, USA

Chokoloskee, Florida, USA

Everglades, Florida, USA

Important events

Related movies

Epigraph

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundre-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before. -- Jacob Riis

Dedication

With love to my brother Carey and my ever dear Maria

First words

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few.

Quotations

Plume hunters shoot early in the breeding season when egret plumes are coming out real good. When them nestlings get pinfeathered, and squawking loud cause they are always hungry, them parent birds lose the little sense God give 'em. They are going to come in to tend their young no matter what, and a man using one of them Flobert rifles that don't snap no louder than a twig can stand there under the trees in a big rookery and pick them birds off as fast as he can reload. . . . A broke-up rookery, that ain't a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it's a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain't no adults left to feed them young and protect 'em from the sun and rain. let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear 'em to pieces. A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up on Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good. . . . It's the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghostly trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbonds to eat at the scrawny things that's backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pushing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain't never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds 'em, cause they's so many young that the carrion birds just can't keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed and stupid they can't hardly fly.

truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

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Shadow Country

▾Book descriptions

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * "Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature."--Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone--Peter Matthiessen's great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century--were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country "Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate."--Los Angeles Times "Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It's the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes."--Don DeLillo "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." --Richard Ford "Shadow Country, Matthiessen's distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy."--W. S. Merwin "[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel."--The Miami Herald

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